[Serpentine]

While this is lovely and all the rest of it, I often have to deal with supporting things like this as a service for friends' NGO and living in SA.

Kindles are most likely the worst devices to hand out, specifically K3's - they are pretty damn fragile compared to most phones and such. They are a closed platform in almost every regards above replacing a battery. There is no software that is reasonably easy for syncing documents (i.e lesson plans) - let along authoring them - for educators (and getting them using Calibre/kindlegen - good luck!). Prepackaged and free books are fantastic, but at some point you leave the bounds of English setwork and there's very little other practical use outside of reading the supplied free novels (which are likely in a second or third language).

A complete lack of app support outside of America and no native, trivial note taking (or other functional case) seems questionable. Library support - wishful. Amazon aftermarket support? if you need a replacement, however I doubt these would qualify, even in SA we're only able to use the Amazon International Services items, which is about 5% of the Amazon marketplace, book prices and limits are rather draconian.

All of this often leaves some pretty decent hardware taking damage extremely quickly without anyone to really do something about it; or not understood gifts being sold/traded as soon as the teacher/church/someone isn't looking (just look at the culture of smoking ARV's).

At some rather low point $40? * x students is most likely far better spent on employing actual teachers or working on a more open reader for this outreach (even if that excludes amazon).